Aug

23

It’s nice to see the Inquirer has jumped right past regular porn and gone right into old man-and-woman porn in an attempt to drive traffic to the site. Geeze, and you think the Eagles cutting Jeremiah Trotter would have been what really drove people to Philly.com.

Jul

23

Jun

25

It’s nice to know (for me, at least) that if I do take a week off, there will be plenty of material waiting for me when I return. But more on this later; new material has simply appeared, like magic, in today’s Inquirer. I speak, of course, of Faye Flam’s “Carnal Knowledge” column.

Today’s piece is about gays, and why people hate them. The headline is pretty clear: “What fuels the hatred of homosexuality?” What makes the column more interesting than usual: There’s no mention of the Bible at all. It’s like writing a column about the cause of the American Civil War and not mentioning slavery.

Flam instead focuses on the “ick factor” of (for the most part) straight men, who abhor the idea of two men kissing or assfucking or whatever. This makes sense, of course; to be honest, I feel men are so disgusting I can’t even understand how straight women find men attractive. (I suppose if they didn’t it would be the end of the species; mankind is saved because not everyone is as neurotic as I am.) “Isn’t it kind of babyish to declare gays immoral because you think their sex lives are icky?” Flam writes. Of course, what if your all-knowing and all-powerful god decides two men shouldn’t hook up? Hey, I don’t get it either, but who are we to doubt omniscience?

Okay, so lotsa men don’t like gays (and, therefore, gay marriage) because they feel it’s icky. After finally mentioning religious teachings, Flam also cites a study by Leon Kass, who worked with President Bush: “Kass’ essay focused not on gay marriage, but on human cloning, which, he wrote, makes us uneasy for a reason.” This is like citing an essay on the Panic of 1837 in my hypothetical Civil War column.

But, really, it all comes down to one thing: We (not me, but the royal “American”) hate gays because we hate smokers. And, ah, carnivores.

Rozin suggests that liberals tend to go after smokers partly for the same reason. It’s far from a perfect analogy, and I’m not really bothered by smokers. To me, slaughterhouses are disgusting and cast doubt on the morality of buying supermarket steak (although not enough to stop me from eating a hamburger at a barbecue).

Apr

30

If you remember way… actually, wait, there’s no way you’re going to remember. So way back when this blog wasn’t even a month old (and was even worse than it is now), September 2005, Metro entertainment editor Dorothy Robinson interviewed Neil Strauss, who wrote The Game.

I sorta called bullshit on it at the time, because it used terms like “sarge” to talk about picking up women. Later, I actually read his book — I had a free copy, I swear — and apparently all these things were true. Strauss figured out how to get any woman he wanted and was dating the guitarist from Hole or something by the end of the book. (Who knew?)

Naturally, suddenly — and by “suddenly,” I mean “a year and a half ago” — “pick-up artists” are the hottest rage around, and so today the Inquirer’s Faye Flam writes about the new book by The Game’s sidekick character, Mystery, with the definitely non-sexist title of The Mystery Method: The Foolproof Way To Get Any Woman You Want Into Bed. (Or maybe The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women Into Bed, as an Inquirer photo shows. Apparently this book is so amazing it has two different titles.)

Students pay $2,150 for a three-day seminar taught by one of Mystery’s disciples, which is way more expensive than Match.com. Apparently, getting a girl includes such tips as having good body language, telling girls they suck (in a friendly way) and coming up with some sort of stupid story to tell a girl so she immediately takes your pants off. Or, y’know, something like that.

Flam talks about research — this is the Inquirer, after all — on similar subjects by scientists, including one who says playing hard to get activates dopamine circuits — also activated by, say, cocaine — in the brain on the person who’s been rejected. Wow! I didn’t know I was a cokehead!

But this article is only the beginning (I hope).

This story got even more interesting when I met Mystery himself. Maybe I’ll write about that in my next column. I’d give it about 50-50 odds.

Oh, playing hard to get, eh, Flam? Just write the damn article before I overdose.

Dec

4

• If you’re planning on having some sweaty, condom-free sex on Tuesday night, then do the five branches Bucks County Planned Parenthood have a deal for you! The ‘Hood will be giving out free Plan B on Wednesday morning, so you can look just as serene as the official model for the drug. [Bucks County Courier Times]

• With Scott Graham gone in the Phillies’ booth next year — who will do Graham Slam commercials? — the Phils have added a new analyst: None other than Gary Matthews! Welcome back, Sarge! (Apparently I’m the only one who will miss Scott Graham, though. I thought he had really improved over the past few seasons.) Wheels is still around, so the Chris Wheeler Glossary will certainly be expanding. [Beerleaguer]

• Why are men bigger than women? Why, Faye Flam reports, men are violent assholes, that’s why. However, men, be glad you’re not a deep-sea angler fish, where the woman is 500k times heavier than the man. I bet both genders of that fish have issues. [Inquirer]

I don’t know what it is about Faye Flam’s column, but there’s always some sort of unintentional hilarity. Is it because I have the maturity of a 12-year-old? I do, but I don’t know if that explains it all. Could it just be that the way the Inquirer “has” to write about sex makes it funnier? Maybe. Could it just be an excuse to find something to make fun of in lieu of actual content? Certainly.

Anyway, In this week’s column, Flam reviews the 1996 book Sperm Wars. Here’s how she describes it:

Sperm Wars is aimed at those of us who have ever paused in mid-thrust to wonder what, exactly, we’re doing.

Oct

2

A reader named Bob called me a second time last week to urge me to visit a clothing-optional beach in New Jersey - at Sandy Hook. That’s almost in New York, so I took a shortcut and visited on the Web.

July is dominance/submission month, or so it would seem from the strange confluence of e-mail that readers sent. First came a couple of e-mails from “Brian.” Brian is looking for a woman to dominate him, but until he finds his dream dominatrix, he said he’d like me to help him practice by occasionally telling him to go to bed. He usually retires about 11, but said it would be really fun if I ordered him to bed at, say, 10.

It sounded incredible. A species that can live virtually forever, enjoy sex well into its second century, and bypass menopause completely. ¶ Rumor had it such a charmed life belonged to a humble turtle that inhabited the marshlands of the Jersey Shore.

I never thought of popularized science writing as potentially dangerous, even after I started writing “Carnal Knowledge” - a sex-themed column about the natural world and humanity’s place in it.

But then it started. I stood accused of harming other people’s children. And that’s no small thing. Sometimes the accusations show up in our letters section. Others go directly to my in-box. Some letter writers say they’re Christians, others not. One self-described liberal said I should know it’s not just conservatives who had to cancel their subscriptions to keep their children safe from my column.

The creators of the movie Snakes on a Plane did at least a little science homework. For those who haven’t seen it, the bad guys in the film manipulate the behavior of a bunch of snakes using scent signals known as pheromones.

Science may have found an answer to that question made famous by Maureen Dowd: Are men necessary? If other creatures are anything to go by, men are essential to keeping our species healthy, and would still be necessary even if women started making their own sperm.

Sep

18

Sex for men is often a penny ante game; for women the stakes get higher. A man who doesn’t love a woman can get her pregnant and abandon her, he can boast to others and hurt her reputation, he can give her a disease (most sexually transmitted diseases are more harmful to women), or he can eat up her precious time as her biological clock ticks away.

Sep

7

Reptiles really do rely on pheromones more than any other vertebrate class, and scientists really have used pheromones to alter their behavior. The one subtle difference: In the movie, the snakes were induced to attack people; in the real world, scientists made otherwise heterosexual male snakes jump on other males. [...]

It’s a little-appreciated fact that Snakes on a Plane is based on a true story. In the real version, brown tree snakes normally native to Australia or New Guinea stowed away on planes during World War II, invaded Guam, and ate all the songbirds. Today the invasive snake still terrorizes people on Guam and has spread to Hawaii, where it threatens the bird population.

This is just one reason we need scientists to study snakes and their pheromone-driven sex lives.

Of course, the screenwriter had to change the story a bit.

And if you were to nitpick, true pheromones communicate within a single species, Mason says. In the movie, cobras and rattlesnakes and pythons all reacted to “the pheromone,” which was, herpetologically speaking, ridiculous.

So, for those of you who saw Snakes on a Plane and left the theater going, “Hmm. I wonder if that could actually happen…” you now have your answer: Uhh, maybe